The phone began to ring on the windowsill, where Jane had not intended to leave it. She leapt up from the sofa and studied the caller ID. She glanced away, defeated. Becka listened as her mom told the party on the other end to call the main office, she wasn’t showing at the moment. She had to repeat herself. “I said call the main office,” said Jane. “The main office!” She paused. “Then look it up in the fucking phone book!”
She stabbed the phone long and hard and it issued a discordant tone change, a small chaotic noise. She walked back to the sofa.
Becka had a feeling that he wasn’t coming home. She didn’t know how she knew this. It was an intuition brought on by the memory of the misery he suffered strapped to the hospital bed and a certainty that he would not willingly repeat it.
“Are you prepared for him not to come home?” she asked.
“He has to come home,” Jane said. “What other option is there?”
She told Becka about the man who had tried to rape him behind the grocery store in Newark. “It’s not safe. There’s only one place for him.”
The phone rang again. Jane answered and turned to Becka, nodding. It was him. “He won’t stop talking,” she said. She listened awhile longer. “I can’t make sense of it.”
“Tell him I’m here. Tell him I want to know where he is.”
“Tim? Tim, Becka’s here. She wants to know where you are.”
She could hear her dad’s voice, muffled inside the phone, breathlessly spilling out word after word as her mom’s face grew increasingly blank. She looked at Becka and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “This is what I mean,” she said, and handed the phone to Becka.
“Dad?”
“—cruel, and dumb. Like those idiot kids from the high school, you see them in the movie theater, you can’t understand their speech. You don’t know, maybe they’re going to follow you out into the parking lot and jump on your car and then pummel you to death with a baseball bat. He doesn’t know reason—”
“Dad—”
“What sort of life is that? He belongs in an institution, but what institution would have him? There’s nothing specially designed, there’s no expert on hand. Oh, I know, they’re all experts, we’re nothing but a country of experts. But this one? This one’s an idiot. So treat him like an idiot. I don’t just mean restrain him. I mean subdue him, electrify him. Electrify him at the highest voltages, and beat him, they should beat him with batons, they should withhold food from him, starve him into submission, starve him within an inch of his life. They really should just abandon the hope of reform and work on him and work on him like cult leaders do, you know, like how political torturers do, really work him down until there is nothing left, he will never walk again, there is just a mad little smile maybe, maybe every once in a while he opens his eyes or remembers a little bit of song… news guy wept and told us… earth was really dying… cried so much his face was wet— I’d be happy with that,” he said, and then the phone went dead.
4
You go on and on. Your one note gets repetitive, it’s taxing. The crying, the lowing, the constant me me me. Do you know what you’re missing? The color of birds, a vibrant spectrum. The moon. The, the… a lot, let’s just say you’re missing a lot. Some very interesting people, opening their eyes to the wonder of the world, responded by taking voyages across the ocean, setting up easels on mountaintops. You, on the other hand, you hum. You vibrate with cold pain. You moan dumbly of want and complaint. Your steady low register, it would have driven them mad. They would have jumped overboard if their souls had been saddled with you.
“You are a hominid,” Tim said out loud.
Food!
Thunder was rattling in the distance and the lightning cut a vein of silver across a cloudy opaline sky.
“You have walked backward three million years. You are a branch of ancestors fallen extinct.”
Food! replied the other mutely.
“Food!” Tim cried out above the thunder.
People packing up their trunks and returning their carts stopped to look.
Food food food! the other howled.
“FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD!” cried Tim.
And within the minute they had walked the rest of the way through the parking lot of the supermarket.